From Bennie’s monorail to trolleybuses ... the many dreams that hit the buffers

FROM trolleybuses to the Clockwork Orange, Clutha ferries to trams, down the years Glaswegians have adopted various modes of transport – some more successful than others.

Had it gone ahead, surely none would have been more unusual than George Bennie’s futuristic monorail.

It would have seen travellers whizz overhead in rocket-shaped carriages dangling from towering gantries and at speeds of up to 120mph. Electrically powered and propeller driven, inventor Bennie believed his monorail plan was the answer to the rising demand for rapid, clean travel and inexpensive travel.

A quarter-mile-long prototype was constructed in Milngavie in the 1930s, but Bennie’s idea failed to attract financial backing.

Around the same time, Glasgow Corporation Transport Department was operating electrically powered trolleybuses. The fleet – the only one of its kind to operate in post-second World War Britain – used electricity but failed to win Glaswegians’ hearts the way the city’s trams had.

Trolleybuses ran from 1949 until 1967, until they were scrapped in favour of diesel buses. Ironically, of course, the switch from diesel to electric vehicles is now a UK and

Scottish Government priority.

Glasgow’s expanding road network dealt a fatal blow to ferries and canal boats as common modes of transport.

And more recently there have been studies examining if old railway tunnels, abandoned since the Beeching cuts, could create a subway line to serve the west end, east end and south side.

And in the mid-1990s, the Strathclyde Tram Project proposed the reintroduction of trams, with a 20km route from Maryhill to Easterhouse.

The plan was dumped after a public inquiry that found in favour of objectors, among them local bus operators.